Great Harry: A Biography of Henry VIII

I

Young Harry

1

Aboffe all thynge

Now lete us synge

Both day and nyght,

Adew mornyng,

A bud is spryngynge

Of the red rose and the whyght.

ON the morning of June 12, 1497, Elizabeth of York hurried with her five-year-old son Henry from her mother-in-law’s house Coldharbour in Thames Street to the Tower of London. Reaching the Outer Ward they entered the White Tower through Coldharbour Gate, then climbed as rapidly as they could the flight of steps that led to the entrance of the great keep. Here, within the massive walls of William the Conqueror’s strong fortress, they would be safe.

Outside the city was in panic. A rebel army of Cornishmen, thousands strong, was advancing on London. Armed with bows and arrows, bills and staves the rebels had marched unopposed through Devon and Somerset, to Bristol, then southeastward through Winchester and Salisbury. A general watch was set in the capital, and Londoners were fleeing the city as from a plague.

At first the king, Henry VII, stayed calmly in his palace upriver at Sheen. He had sent urgent word to his captain Daubeney, who was on his way north to meet a threatened invasion on the Scots border, to bring his men south again to head off the Cornishmen. But as the rebels came closer and there was no sign of Daubeney, the king left Sheen for safer quarters, and two days later his wife and second son followed his example. On the day that the queen and prince moved to the White Tower, fifteen thousand of the rebels encamped at Farnham. The next day they were at Guildford, and then, dangerously near, at Blackheath.

The little prince who spent the next uncertain days beside his mother in the Tower apartments was a chunky, round-faced child whose blond hair was bobbed to the ears and combed into long bangs across his forehead. A sketch made of him at about this time shows his alert, interested expression, his face set off by a broad hat with a large feather curled around its brim. His mother, then in her early thirties, was a tall, handsome woman with fair skin and pale gold hair. Londoners called her the good queen Elizabeth, and Prince Henry, who was rarely alone with her, must have grown closer to her as they waited out the danger together.

At last the royal army arrived, and on June 17 Daubeney and his men confronted the rebels at Blackheath. Two thousand of the Cornishmen were killed that day; the rest, frustrated and beaten, surrendered and then set out for home. All that summer they straggled back to their villages, only to find that their punishment was not yet over. All Cornishmen who eat grain garnered since the rebellion, the chronicler wrote, or drink beer brewed with this year’s crops, die as if they had taken poison.¹News of the mysterious deaths spread rapidly. The king’s power was indeed awesome, it was said; he was obviously under the protection of God eternal.

In actuality Henry VII was far from secure on his throne. Within months of the victory at Blackheath the disaffected Cornishmen had joined forces with a stouter rebel, Perkin Warbeck, who had long claimed to be Richard, duke of York, the younger of the ill-fated princes murdered in the Tower many years before. Warbeck’s followers were defeated as they assaulted Exeter, and the false duke of York was captured, but the king’s position seemed hardly more assured in 1497 than it had been when he won the throne by battle twelve years earlier.

The king’s insecurity overshadowed the lives of his children, and Prince Henry had never known a time of calm. In the summer that he was born, his father was preoccupied by the threat of invasion from France and was gathering men and money to cross the Channel into Brittany. When the prince was still a babe in arms the king carried out his invasion—the first and only time he commanded an English army. In young Henry’s early childhood his father was often away from court on progress, journeying from one town or royal manor to another throughout the areas of discontent, showing himself to his subjects and sending out spies in an effort to purge his land of all seditious seed and double-hearted fruit.² Perkin Warbeck began his six-year campaign to supplant Henry VII when Prince Henry was an infant, and before his misadventure ended he had drawn the French king Charles VIII, the Scots king James IV, and Henry’s onetime supporter Sir William Stanley into the conspiracy against the reigning king.

The plots against Henry VII were all the more unsettling in that they were accompanied by murderous intrigues at court. According to a confession written in the year before the Cornish rebellion, several men, among them the archdeacon of London, determined to kill the king and his children, his mother, and those near his person. Hoping to avoid implicating themselves in the crime, they turned to magic. They went all the way to Rome to find a sorcerer who could provide the deadly charm they needed, an ointment which when spread around a door the king was certain to walk through would somehow compel those who loved him best to become his murderers.³ Hazards of other kinds intruded on the lives of the royal children. During the Christmastide celebrations in 1497, when the king and his family were in residence at the medieval palace of Sheen, a fire broke out. The flames spread quickly through the wooden structure, destroying the apartments of the king and queen and driving the entire household out into the courtyard. Shivering in the December cold, the servants, the household officials and the royal family watched their possessions go up in flames; great substance of riches, as well in jewels and other things of riches, was perished and lost.⁴

At Christmas of 1497 there were four children, two sons and two daughters. The eldest, Prince Arthur, was eleven. Princess Margaret, a lively girl who was said to be her father’s favorite, was eight. Prince Henry was six and the youngest, little Princess Mary, was not yet two. A fifth child, Princess Elizabeth, had died at the age of three several years earlier.

Of the four surviving children, Arthur took precedence. He was the eldest; he was the best-looking, with skin so fair it was almost pale and curly blond hair; most important, he was heir to the throne. Arthur Tudor incarnated the union of his father’s house of Lancaster with his mother’s house of York. He was the rosebush of England, the symbolic joining of the red and white roses, the hope of the Tudor dynasty. At his birth Elizabeth of York, in gratitude for her safe delivery and for the arrival of the hoped-for male heir, founded a chapel dedicated to the virgin in Winchester Cathedral. Her pleasure in her son increased as he grew into a slender boy, admired for his looks and for the rudiments of princely geniality he showed even in childhood. Though unprepossessing in personality, Arthur filled his role well, and gave every sign of growing into a suitable king.

There was always a special bond between Arthur and his younger sister Margaret, but about his relationship with his brother Henry the records are silent. Five years separated the brothers, and by the time Henry was old enough to be a companion to Arthur the latter was sent to hold court on the Welsh border. After this they saw one another only on ceremonial occasions, or when the family gathered for Christmas.

Certainly the king and queen found a second son to be an entirely welcome addition, and when Henry was born on June 28, 1491, preparations were immediately made for an elaborate christening, while extra servants were brought in to help out in the royal nursery. Tradition called for the child to be baptized in the font of Canterbury Cathedral; it was brought up to Greenwich and installed in the church of the Franciscan Observants, high enough so that the nobles and townspeople who crowded into the church could see the ceremony without pressing Bishop Fox, who performed the baptism, too closely. Regulations put out by the king in the Array of her Majesty’s infants called for the new baby to be had into the nursery where it shall be nourished with a lady governour to the nursery nurse, with four Chamberers, called Rockers. Lady Darcy, as lady mistress, presided over the entire establishment. Among the rockers were Emily Hobbes and Agnes Butler, and Henry’s own beloved nurse, whom he remembered in later years with a generous pension, was Ann Luke.⁵

Shortly before his second birthday Henry received the first of his numerous ceremonial titles, constable of Dover Castle and warden of the Cinque Ports. Later he was made earl marshal of England and lord lieutenant of Ireland, with competent deputies carrying out the actual duties of these offices. In the fall of 1494, when he was three, Henry was required to undergo a series of ceremonies that would have exhausted an adult. On the first of three days of ritual he was set astride a great warhorse and led to Westminster, where after hours of initiation he was made a Knight of the Bath. The next day he received his spurs, and the day after that, before the king and nobles in the Parliament chamber, he was given the title duke of York. There were still more titles and more ceremonies to come—warden of the Scottish Marches, Knight of the Garter—but this was the most significant. In this year of 1494 a false duke of York was still abroad, and Prince Henry was to be made a living rebuke to his claim. To mark the importance of the occasion there were banquets and tournaments at court, and Princess Margaret, then only five, was allowed to present the prize of honor—a ruby ring—to the most valiant combatant in the lists.⁶

From this time on the duke of York was not only the king’s son but a significant, if minor, personage in his own right. As my lord of York he appeared more and more frequently in the rolls of the king’s expenditures, receiving money to play at dice, to pay his servants, to reward his fool John Goose and his minstrels. A precociously gifted musician, Henry had his own band of music makers, independent of those of his father and brother, from early childhood on.⁷ The duke of York was feted by the city of London when he was seven. The lord mayor and aldermen cleared the streets of beggars before his arrival, and saw to it that the cheering Londoners who lined the roadway where the prince’s escort passed were free from disease. In return for the city’s official gift—a pair of gilt goblets—Henry made a brief speech of thanks, adding that he hoped to be worthy of the citizens’ great and kind remembrance in future.

As soon as he was old enough to be out of the nursery Prince Henry began to join in the life of the court. His earliest memories were doubtless of the fools and freaks and entertainers his father loved. In addition to the master fools Scot and Dick, Patch, Diego the Spanish jester, and the foolish duke of Lancaster there were traveling dancers and acrobats—morris dancers, dancing children, tightrope walkers and men who did conjuring tricks. On one occasion the king gave a reward to a fellow who distinguished himself by eating of coals. Monstrosities such as the great Welsh child, the little Scotsman, and the great woman of Flanders were brought to court for the king’s amusement, and when he was not jousting or playing tennis or gambling with his courtiers Henry VII liked to surround himself with human oddities.⁸ Long before he was able to join in the sport himself young Henry knew all about the hawks with their hoods and gilt bells, and went often to see the mules and horses in the stables and his mother’s greyhounds in their kennels. Later he was brought to see the royal lions and leopards that were kept at the Tower. These he feared, for one of the lions had mauled a man to death earlier in the reign.

At those rare times when Arthur, Margaret and Henry were together they followed their father to the hunt, or watched a bull or bear baited by dogs. Henry taught all his children to shoot with the longbow, and they became proficient archers. At fourteen Margaret shot true enough to kill a buck, and both Arthur and Henry rivaled the archers of the king’s guard in their marksmanship.⁹

The royal children were an important part of courtly display, and they took their place in the carefully arranged grouping around the king in the presence chamber whenever important visitors presented themselves. They were spectators at all the great court functions. They stood out of the way in the king’s bedchamber on New Year’s morning as the usher of the chamber called out from the doorway to announce the bringing in of the gifts. Sire, here is a New Year’s gift coming from the queen, he said, following custom. Let it come in, Sire. Sitting at the foot of his bed, the king received the gifts of every member of his court, in order of rank, from the queen through the greatest noblemen through the lords and ladies of lesser titles. Afterward the queen received her gifts, and finally the children were allowed to see theirs. Later, on Twelfth Night, they were in the great hall at Westminster when the steward brought in the wassail, giving the traditional greeting Wassail, wassail, wassail! after which the chapel singers answered with a good song. They stayed to watch the disguising that followed, in which a dozen ladies and gentlemen danced in an exotic spectacle; the torchlit hall was always hung with tapestries for the occasion, and benches were erected for the servants and ordinary folk to sit on. After the disguising, confections and spices were served to the king and queen, and then to the courtiers; over a hundred such dishes were served at the Twelfth Night entertainment of 1494. Such magnificence was not confined to holidays. Some eight hundred people dined at the king’s table even on ordinary days; when ambassadors or other dignitaries were present the number was even higher, and the dishes—venison, shields of brawn (pickled swine or beef) in armor, swans and peacocks, served tail and all—seemed never to end.

Hand in hand with this splendor went the primitive discomforts of a medieval court. All the royal palaces were perpetually cold and damp. The only warmth came from the fires kept burning in rooms with hearths. The other rooms were warmed, after a fashion, by fire pans—round iron pans on wheels, filled with slow-burning charcoal—which were moved from room to room as needed. Carpets of rushes and sweet herbs caught most of the spills and filth that fell on the floor, but even when these were changed as frequently as the king’s regulations required the rooms stank after only a few weeks of use, and the household had to move on to another residence. There was no plumbing, only wooden privies kept covered by a fair cushion and a green cloth. At night the wardrober brought in a night-stool and urinal at need. Cleanliness as we understand it was all but impossible. Expensive tallow or olive-oil-based soaps were available in wealthy households, but the fleas and bugs that lived in the walls and bred in the folds of clothing infested even the cleanest bodies. Mulberry twigs tied in bunches under the bed helped to keep the fleas away at night, but during the day the best that even the king could do was to wear a little piece of fur next to his skin to attract all the vermin to one spot.

The age was unkind to children. Margaret Courtenay, a cousin and companion of the royal children, choked on a fishbone and died at a very young age. Arthur, Margaret and Henry appeared to be strong enough, and the queen’s third daughter, Mary, was surviving infancy. But her third son, Edmund, was to live only sixteen months, and by the time she reached her mid-thirties there was some doubt whether Elizabeth of York could bear healthy children in future.

2

Whoso that will himself apply

To pass the time of youth jolly,

Advance him to the company

Of lusty bloods and chivalry

IN the summer of 1499 Erasmus of Rotterdam, soon to become the most celebrated scholar of his age, visited the royal nursery. Erasmus was staying at the Greenwich country house of William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who that summer had been chosen as companion to Prince Henry; Mountjoy was a former pupil of Erasmus, and as such was well suited to serve as an example of humanist courtesy to the prince. He did not come along, though, when Thomas More visited his friend Erasmus and took him out for a walk to the neighboring village of Eltham.

The largest and finest of Henry VII’s country houses, Eltham Palace was set in a forested hunting park where the king liked to hunt stag with his companions. The spacious estate held lists for tournaments and outbuildings for banquets and entertainments as well as the imposing main building with its moated inner courtyard and great hall. In this hall the palace staff and all of Mountjoy’s household were assembled, rank on rank, to greet the visitors, and in their midst was a stocky boy whose natural authority gave away his identity.

Recalling the incident more than twenty years later, Erasmus remembered how the eight-year-old Prince Henry had already something of royalty in his demeanor, in which there was a certain dignity combined with a singular courtesy.¹ Arthur was not present—he was in Wales presiding at his father’s court for the Marches—and in his absence Henry was the star of the occasion. Margaret stood at his right and Mary played on the floor beside him, but it was Henry who received all the attention. More bowed to him and presented him with something he had written, and Erasmus, embarrassed that he had nothing to offer, made his excuses and promised to remedy his oversight another time. Caught off guard, Erasmus was angry with his friend for not warning him in advance about preparing a literary gift for the prince; his chagrin was deepened when later that day he received a personal note from Henry challenging something from his pen.

He went immediately back to Mountjoy’s house and sat down to write. Three days later he finished the Prosopopoeia Britanniae, which he presented to Henry with a dedicatory letter. We have for the present dedicated these verses, like a gift of playthings, to your childhood, Erasmus began, in elegant Latin, and shall be ready with more abundant offerings, when your virtues, growing with your age, shall supply more abundant material for poetry.

There is no doubt that Henry, at eight, could read Erasmus’ Latin. His tutor, John Skelton, was a scholar of wide learning—Erasmus called him that incomparable light and ornament of British letters—and he saw to it that the prince’s education was extensive and demanding. He taught Henry Latin and Greek himself; the boy learned French from Giles d’Ewes, author of a noted French grammar. Either d’Ewes or one of Prince Arthur’s teachers, Bernard Andre, taught Henry to write a large, round hand influenced by the Italian style. Proficiency in Latin and French was expected of wellborn boys at six or seven; by the time he was ten Henry was reading the Latin treatise Skelton wrote for both Henry and Arthur to instruct them in the duties and behavior of a prince.²

As his principal tutor Skelton held great sway over the bent of Henry’s mind. His influence was many-sided, for though he was poet laureate and had recently become a priest Skelton was as ribald and irreverent as he was sharp-witted. He had not yet begun to write the scurrilous poems that have made him the most famous poet of his generation, but his biting sarcasm was already making enemies for him everywhere. He infuriated other writers, clerics, and especially his bishop, who censured him and suspended him temporarily from his church. Skelton’s parishioners, who disapproved of his clandestine marriage to a woman who lived in his house, complained that his sermons were more fit for the stage than the pulpit, and when in 1502 he went too far with outrageous behavior he was briefly imprisoned.

Yet it was by design that this colorful personality was put in charge of Prince Henry’s early development; Skelton was much favored by Henry’s grandmother Margaret, countess of Richmond, who acted as his patron and doubtless chose him as mentor for her favorite grandson. He was chosen chiefly for his learning, but the countess must have hoped that something of his wit and irreverence would rub off on Henry too. Both the prince and his tutor were strong extroverts, and there seems to have been another natural link between them as well: like Henry, Skelton had a gift for music, and liked to sing his poems while he accompanied himself on the lute. In later life Henry loved to sing folk songs with his courtiers; it is more than likely he acquired the habit from singing with Skelton as a boy.

No record of the order of Henry’s school day survives. But outlines for the education of royal sons in the generations before and after his childhood describe a pattern of study and recreation that must have prevailed in the nursery at Eltham.³ This traditional regimen called for the boy to rise very early, hear matins sung by his chaplain, and then attend mass at six o’clock. A light meal of ale or wine and meat and bread followed, and then the morning’s serious study began—Latin, Greek, and French, penmanship, and perhaps mathematics on one day, logic or law on another. Chivalry was taken as seriously as the classics, and Henry’s young head was filled with tales of knightly valor, of virtue and honor, and of the prowess of his medieval ancestors. War and mighty deeds became his obsession; naturally he dreamed of fighting the traditional enemy of England’s medieval kings, France. Erasmus, who saw Prince Henry a number of times in his childhood, later wrote to a friend that the boy’s dream as a child had been the recovery of the French provinces—the lost dream of the Plantagenets in the Hundred Years’ War.

The morning’s studies were cut short at about ten o’clock, when dinner was served, the dishes borne in by worshipful folk in livery, The tutor presided at the table, watching to see that his pupil ate and drank mannerly, after the book of courtesy. Lapses were to be punished with a stout stick. The long afternoons were given over to martial exercises—jousting on horseback at a quintain or at the rings, riding in armor, fighting with blunt weapons both on horseback and on foot. Boys learned to wield a two-handed sword and battle-axe, to thrust with a dagger, and to defend themselves as they would some day do on the battlefield. To strengthen themselves for this far-off contest they ran foot races against other boys, leaped ditches and hurdled fences, and wrestled till they were exhausted. For recreation they hawked and hunted, and practiced shooting with the longbow.

At four in the afternoon, after evensong, there was another light meai of meat and bread and wine, and then came music lessons and the polite arts of singing, harping, playing the lute and dancing, and practice in courtly conversation. For this feminine company was required; it was normal for boys to be admitted to the women’s apartments to play chess or gambling games in the evening. At nine these honest recreations came to an end. The palace gates were shut and the children put to bed, their rooms cleared of servants and playmates and the curtains drawn. Made secure by a sure and good watch, they slept until early the next morning.

This educational plan was not meant to be followed alone, and it was as one of a group of children that Henry received his instruction. Among the members of this little circle were John St. John, nephew of Henry’s grandmother Margaret, Edward Pallet, a child whom Elizabeth of York adopted and raised, and the three Courtenay children—Henry, Margaret and Edward—whose mother was Elizabeth of York’s sister Katherine. The Courtenays did not live at Eltham; they had their own establishment in Essex near Havering-atte-Bower. But they saw a great deal of their royal cousins, and Henry Courtenay and Henry Tudor were particularly close. Another boy who was constantly in Henry’s company was his page William Compton. When Compton became a ward of Henry VII at the age of ten or eleven, he was appointed to serve the infant duke of York, and was continually in his service from then on.

Compton was to remain a lifelong intimate, but another boyhood companion was to be Henry’s closest and most enduring friend: Charles Brandon. An orphan, Brandon had been brought into the royal household at the age of seven to be a companion to Prince Arthur, He grew into a strapping, handsome boy, tall and broad-shouldered and fit to race and ride and joust alongside the prince of Wales and, later, alongside his younger brother. Brandon’s gifts of mind were few, but his splendid military heritage more than made up for his dullness of intellect. His grandfather William Brandon had been Henry Tudor’s standard-bearer at Bosworth Field. The elder Brandon had held the Tudor banner aloft until Richard III sought him out and fought him to the death. This gallant sacrifice put the king in debt to Brandon’s orphaned grandson, and young Charles Brandon in turn felt the pull of ancestral loyalty to the Tudor house.

Beyond this, though, a strong affinity developed between Brandon and the young Prince Henry, who was at least six years his junior. They were drawn together by a shared physical exuberance—a headstrong delight in running farther, hunting longer and jousting more tirelessly than any of the other boys. Weary of his arduous lessons, and of the exalted company of the scholars, clerics and poets who crowded his father’s court, Henry would turn to Brandon to lead him out onto the tiltyard or into the fields, where he could serve as an alter ego to Henry’s passionate physicality. The prince grew up in the older boy’s shadow, watching him, learning from him, always stretching his own abilities against Brandon’s. In the end, as Henry approached the threshold of manhood, he began to outdistance Brandon, and eventually overtook him in every sport and skill they shared. But by this time nothing could shatter the bond that had grown between them. They would be friends for life.

The lore of the fields and of the tilting ground were of course central to Henry’s education. No gentleman could afford to be ignorant of the mysteries of the chase. He had to know the nature of the hart and hind and boar that fed by night and lay in cover in the forest during the day, and of the buck and fox and roe that hid themselves at night and came out into the fields in the morning. He had to know too the times and seasons of each beast, the tricks of scent, weather and wind, the arts of hunting with hounds. Hunting was more than sport: it was preparation for war, a toughening of nerve and sinew in conditions not unlike those of the battleground. Hunters by their continual travail, painful labor, often watching, and enduring of hunger, of heat, and of cold, are much enabled above others to the service of their Prince and Country in the wars, one treatise declared, having their bodies for the most part by reason of their continual exercise in much better health, than other men have, and their minds also by this honest recreation the more fit and the better disposed to all other good exercises.⁴

If hunting tempered the body for war, riding was the distinguishing mark of the gentleman warrior. Noblemen were set apart from other men by their ability to ride the giant warhorses bred to carry the weight of a knight in full body armor. Royal sons were expected to excel in horsemanship, for it was understood that no adroitness in diplomacy or at the council board could compensate for a poor showing in the tiltyard or at the wars. No earthly thing bred such wonder to a Prince, an Italian riding master wrote, as to be a good horseman. Skill of government was but a Pedanteria in comparison …⁵

Horsemanship had to be learned young, while the leg muscles were still developing; only then could the child acquire the agility needed to leap onto the horse from either side, or from the back, while he ran free. Once the apprentice rider had learned to mount and dismount without using the stirrup, he tried the same thing in armor, eventually becoming able to grab the mane of a galloping horse and jump into the saddle while burdened with a helmet and breastplate and with heavy cuisses on his legs. Good carriage and a graceful bearing on horseback were essential; with these intact the boy practiced keeping his horse within the lists, running him straight at the ring and not allowing him to swerve aside from an oncoming horse and rider. Management of the lance came next, calling for a coordination of eye and arm needed to avoid running the lance into the post instead of through the ring. Iron-hard courage was needed too, to watch the approach of an opponent and to sustain the violent impact of his lance where it struck the body armor.

All these skills, plus a basic knowledge of horseflesh—of the quality, age and value of a horse, of equine diseases and remedies—were an integral part of what one educational theorist called the urbanity and nurture of England, the complex of civilizing arts that were the cultural inheritance of the feudal class. The most basic of these arts was civility itself. Politeness, inoffensiveness, courtesy toward superiors and inferiors had to be learned painstakingly through treatises on good behavior. Wipe your nose with a handkerchief—not on your gown, or on the tablecloth— and never look into the handkerchief afterward, these treatises advised. Spit, if you must, on the floor at your feet and tread it well into the rushes. Belch thou near to no man’s face, with a corrupt fumosity, one treatise read. But turn from such occasion, friend; hate such ventosity. And above all, break wind quietly, and never at the dinner table; only drunkards and idiots and senile old men do that.

Among the civilizing arts was that of personal hygiene. Children were taught to clean their teeth with toothpicks and peeled wands, and to rub them with a linen cloth to whiten them. To keep their breath sweet they were told to sleep with their mouths open, and to wear a nightcap— preferably a red one—with a hole in it through which the vapor may go out. An effort was made to influence eating habits too, though this must have been a vain effort at Henry VII’s bountiful court. The stomach is the body’s kitchen, young boys and girls were told; everyone knows that if the kitchen is disorderly the rest of the establishment is in chaos. Moderate food and drink will keep the kitchen in order; overeating was hazardous, lest the belly-God hale you at length captive into his prison house of gourmandise where you shall be afflicted with as many diseases as you have devoured dishes of sundry sorts.⁶

But familiarity with knightly skills and pastimes and civilized courtesy were only the externals of gentlemanly conduct. If Henry was to fulfill his princely office he would have to acquire subtler qualities of spirit. He would have to take on the intangible air of authority that inspired fear and respect in others, and with it the trait the writers of his time called affability—the ability to turn a gentle and familiar visage on lesser folk to comfort them and inspire their love. He would have to learn to exercise majesty, that elusive quality which, like as the sun does his beams, casts on the beholders and hearers a pleasant and terrible reverence.⁷ The man of majesty carried himself with dignity, spoke deliberately and seriously, without using coarse language, and accommodated his words and gestures to the occasion. He was an exemplar to those around him, a fatherly yet sainted presence, half man, half angel, whose countenance should be in the stead of a firm and stable law to his inferiors.

Two other qualities were called for. One was magnanimity, a visionary daring beyond ordinary courage which led the nobleman to challenge himself to perform unimaginable feats. Magnanimity was to honor what valor was to arms—an ennobling, high-minded heroism which lifted every bold act into the realm of legend. The other was grace; not the common grace of elegant movement or graciousness, but an air of effortlessness with which the true nobleman performed even the most difficult test of skill. To make the impossible seem easy, and then to dismiss the accomplishment with nonchalance: that was what every wellborn man strove for, though few achieved it. In Castiglione’s words, the consummate sign of nobility was to use in every thing a certain recklessness, to cover art withal, and … to do it without pain, and (as it were) not minding it.

These two characteristics, which were to be so prominent in Prince Henry as he grew older, had already begun to stamp themselves on the boy whose air of royalty so impressed Erasmus on that summer afternoon in 1499.

3

Upon my lap my sovereign sits

And sucks upon my breast;

Meantime his love maintains my life

And gives my sense her rest.

Sing lullaby, my little boy.

Sing lullaby, mine only joy!

IF Prince Henry’s tutors instilled in him one set of guidelines for noble conduct, his father supplied a living model for another. Henry Tudor was a remarkable man who had led a remarkable life. Forced into exile at the age of fourteen, he grew to manhood in captivity in Brittany, far from his native Wales and his beloved mother Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond. The countess was a great-great-granddaughter of Edward III; by an intricate genealogical calculation this made her son the leading male claimant to the English throne in the Lancastrian line. But the rival Yorkist line held power, in the person of Edward IV, and it was not until Edward’s death in 1483—when Henry Tudor was twenty-four—that the Yorkist fortunes began to turn. Richard III became king, and almost immediately Margaret Beaufort, her second husband Lord Stanley, Henry’s uncle Jasper Tudor, many Welsh lords and others alienated by Richard’s tyranny began to conspire his overthrow.

Their support was essential, but without Henry’s own daring their plans would have come to nothing. Borrowing sixty thousand francs from the French king, he assembled an invasion force of two to three thousand Breton and Norman mercenaries and a few hundred English followers. According to one account his soldiers were the worst rabble that could be found—beggerly Bretons and faint-hearted Frenchmen, Richard III called them—and their arms and equipment too were makeshift. But under the leadership of the tall, slender knight whose blond hair shone in the sun like burnished gold and whose blue-gray eyes, shining and quick, seemed to perceive a hidden destiny, they prevailed over Richard’s army at Bosworth Field. To their shouts of King Harry! King Harry! Richard’s crown was put on his head; the throne became his by right of conquest.

When he became king in 1485 few English men and women had heard of Henry Tudor. Within a few years, though, accounts of his majestic appearance and of the splendors of his court had reached to all corners of his kingdom. Ballads told of his heroic struggle for the crown, and chroniclers noted down his looks and manner for posterity. He was not only fairly tall but well built and strong, one of them wrote, and of a wonderful beauty and fair complexion. He dressed magnificently. A visitor to the royal hunting lodge at Woodstock on an ordinary day found the king wearing a violet gown lined with cloth of gold; around his neck was a jeweled collar, and in his hat a large diamond and an exquisite pearl. His household accounts show a pronounced taste for finery. Silks and satins, furs of many kinds, a stomacher made of ostrich skin were among the entries, and in the years between 1491 and 1505 he spent over £100,000 on jewels. When the king outfitted himself to lead his army into France in the seventh year of his reign, he ordered a matchless suit of armor whose helmet was ornamented with a wealth of pearls and jewels bought from the Lombard merchants.¹

More than anything else about him observers noticed the king’s lively, arresting eyes. They lit up his animated face, especially when he spoke, and they seemed to take in everything around him. They betrayed a keen intelligence preoccupied by constant vigilance, learned in his years of captivity, in his months of assembling and holding together a disparate invasion force, in his years as king facing rebels and pretenders and threats against his life. In his youth Henry VII had had the gift of attracting men’s loyalty; though he never quite lost that gift, by the second decade of his reign it was overshadowed by other qualities. He was shrewd and cautious in government; he had, the chronicler Hall believed, the ingenious forcast of the subtle serpent. He brooded over each of his decisions, and became intolerant of even the slightest departure from his explicit orders. He remained an enthusiastic hunter, forcing the ambassadors who sought audiences with him during the hunting season to ride at his heels through the thickets of the New Forest, but in the late 1490s he was more often to be found conducting experiments to turn base metals into gold, or enlarging his collection of relics. In particular he treasured his piece of the holy cross, brought from Greece, and his leg bone of Saint George, whose feast he kept each year with the greatest solemnity.

Henry’s growing piety was more superstitious than devout, for events in the spring of 1498 had shaken his confidence badly and made him look for occult guidance. Another pretender appeared, this time a Kentish schoolboy impersonating the young earl of Warwick, son of Edward IV’s brother George. The true earl was in prison in the Tower, and the pretender hardly had a chance to make his cause known before the king’s spies caught him and hanged him. But the incident haunted Henry’s mind, and when he heard of a seer who had foretold the deaths of two of his royal predecessors he determined to learn his own fate. He went to the man and asked him bluntly how his death would come. Without answering directly the prophet replied that his life would be in danger throughout the coming year, adding alarming warnings about future conspiracies against the throne. To make matters worse, though the fortuneteller was sworn to secrecy he proved to be indiscreet, and before long rumors of the royal destiny were widespread. Imprisoning the talebearers did little good. The whisperings continued, and the king saw ill-will everywhere he turned. He spent more and more time hearing masses and carrying out religious devotions. During Lent he was on his knees most of the day, his face anxious and drawn. He has aged so much, the Spanish ambassador wrote, "that he seems to be twenty years